The Battle of Verdun

Trench Warfare. These two words have come to encapsulate the miseries of the Great War’s Western Front. The conflict between France and Germany began on July 28, 1914, and would claim the lives of nearly three-and-a half-million soldiers before the armistice four years later.

The longest, and one of the most deadly, battles of the war was the Battle of Verdun, where French defenders held the line against the Germans in 1916. Lasting for ten months, Verdun showcased the grueling war of attrition that defined the Great War as a whole. But how did the war come to Verdun, and how did the area’s geography shape the course of the battle?

In August of 1914, the German army invaded neutral Belgium before turning south into France, bypassing the heavily defended Franco-German border. The German army captured mile after mile of land before being stopped at the Battle of the Marne in September, ushering in the system of trenches that came to define the war.

A year later, by January 1916, the front line had moved little. German war planner Erich von Falkenhayn devised a plan to attack the French city of Verdun, commonly considered the “Gateway to Paris” (Morgan). Falkenhayn hoped that if German troops were to capture the heavily defensible Meuse Heights that threatened this strategically important city, the French would be forced to assault the German Army at great cost (Musée de l’Armée). The plan focused on using massed artillery fire to support the capture of three forts around the city:

1. Fort Douaumont
2. Fort Vaux
3. Fort Souville

Once these forts were taken, Verdun itself would be under threat of German bombardment and attack.

At first glance, the ring of fortresses and hilly terrain around Verdun appears impassable. However, German intelligence suggested that the forts had been stripped of both soldiers and artillery to support the initial French defense in Belgium. Without heavy guns and with only a light garrison, the forts became prime targets for the German army.

The Battle of Verdun represented the place where the French army “held the line” against the German assault and stopped them from opening the way to Paris. But what caused such an important battle to become a killing machine that lasted for almost an entire year? What caused the battle to reach such an intensity that large swathes of the battlefield remain uninhabitable a century later?

The answer lies in the surrounding geography and environment, the same thing that German war planners sought to exploit.

The area around the city of Verdun can be separated into three main features:

1. The hills around the city and the forts built on top of them
2. The Meuse River, which split the battlefield in half, and
3. The flood plains surrounding the Meuse, large areas of flat, low-lying land.

The positions of each feature influenced the battle in different ways.

The primary goal of the battle was control over the hills north of Verdun. Here, the hills roll from one into another, separated only by small ravines carved out by streams. Each hill was hard to take, but the distance between them was short. A strong enough assault, if supported by enough artillery, could break through and take the hill. The image on the left shows a topographical map of part of the Verdun battlefield, highlighting the hills and ravines. Shelter from fire and artillery could only be found near the ravines, which meant an assault on a fortified position would be open and vulnerable. This area, directly west of Fort Douaumont, saw some of the most intense fighting of the entire battle.

The second geographical feature that influenced the course of the battle is the Meuse River. The Mesue split both the battlefield and Verdun into two. Since troops could not cross the Meuse without a bridge, both sides operated as separate fronts. But because troops could fire over the river, they were strategically linked. The way the Meuse shaped the battle can be seen by looking at the front line in different phases of the battle. The initial German attack that took Fort Douaumont was confined to the right bank. Only later did a separate attack take the left bank. Later, the French counterattack only pushed the Germans back on the right bank. The fortified hills on the left bank remained in German hands.

The third feature is where the hills and river meet: the flood plains. The plains around the Meuse and between the hills are nearly impossible to cross or hold during battle. Instead, fighting tended to stop once one side succeeded or failed in taking a hill. The difficulty of an assault on a hill from flat land is demonstrated by the static front on the left bank of the Meuse. German soldiers struggled to capture Le Mort-Homme and Cote 304. However, once they had taken and fortified the hills the French were unable to dislodge them, even after the French counterattack recaptured the forts on the right bank. The graph below represents the elevation of the line stretching across the wide, low-lying plains. Le Mort-Homme is marked with a dot and vertical line, while the French forts are along the tall ridge on the right. As a consequence of the fortifications separated by a wide plain, this area saw less fighting and destruction than other parts of the battlefield. While hills are defensible, they are made much more important by the presence of open plains.

So, how did all of these geographical features coalesce to make Verdun such a bloody battle? The strategic importance of Verdun to both sides meant that they were willing to gain small amounts of land for high casualties. However, geography played an important role in determining the destruction of specific areas.

The hills on the right bank of the Meuse became part of the Zone Rouge, or Red Zone, an area marked by the French government as unfit for human habitation due to unexploded ordnance and lethal levels of toxic chemicals left from the bombardment. The ruins of nine villages have been left to decay, and since farming the toxic soil is impossible, the hills were allowed to forest over (National Geographic). While the buried bombs and toxic chemicals are hard to see, the land is still littered with craters and trenches.

Meanwhile, the floodplain on the left bank of the Meuse, in between the two lines of fortifications, is dotted with small villages and covered in farmland. The scars left by the battle are much lighter here, since the floodplains served as a barrier between French and German positions. The hills on the right bank had no such barrier, so the fighting became incredibly intense. Remnants of the fighting only become visible as you approach Le Mort-Homme itself, but even then the damage is lighter than that on the right bank.

The Battle of Verdun was an incredibly destructive battle in large part because the geography facilitated it. Most of the damage was confined to the hills north of Verdun because the hills provided defensive terrain while the short ravines made attacking costly but possible. The damage to the flat plains was minimal, however, because the opposing lines of hills made an attack unfeasible. The damage to Verdun, and other battlefields throughout the war, was confined to the hills.